Scully & Mills, Smithereens chapbooks

A quick search of the blog in front of you will reveal that I
have written quite a bit about Scully already, and what I like about this one
is I suppose what I like about most of his work — its capacity for being both
imagistic and kinetic at the same time, or, its simulacra of both.By imagistic, I mean concise description and something more, Pound’s “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of
time,”
like,
“a small cracked / black & white / photo from / the 50s // popped out of /
a book on / yr desk”.By kinetic, I mean
the way this poem traces the movement of thought with sudden leaps or jump
cuts, to new and perhaps contrasting images. After the photo, there is suddenly a series of
visions of nature, possibly ranging through time.A “quiet cell / in the woods / berries
birdsong / rootlets” recalls the ascetic life of a mediaeval Irish monk in a
beehive hut.A short ways on there is
this curious scene: “this must / be that / beautiful / little quick //
feathered / animal / feeding by / the // wave-edge” — yeah, the reader might
think, you mean a bird.But what makes
this passage is the off-kilter way it is rendered — it “must be” this thing
that is denoted by its description rather than its name.

As always with Scully, the way/s in which we use language
are under question, or if not that, are at least foregrounded in the
construction of the poem.Much could be
made of Scully’s line breaks and use of enjambment, for example.And after the sequence above, suddenly he
cuts to an image of a “book / opened / on a / table”, which is a scene perhaps
of the very writer’s desk.This breaks
the frame of the poem, as does the gesture toward concrete poetry (where the
vertical-bar keyboard characters placed along a right margin mimic the falling
of raindrops).Scully also discusses the
genesis of the poem in a series of notes, further allowing the reader behind
the veil.As he himself points out, though,
this may be “subjective & unnecessary to know in the first place other than
to give the reader some idea of how the thing was put together.”RAIN
is successful on its own as a poem that is engaged in celebrating life,
perception, and the creation of the self through art.

Another recent Smithereens chapbook is Billy Mills’s from Pensato: More Words for Voices,
readable here:

(I should disclose that Mills recently reviewed a book of
mine, but I have been reading and enjoying his work long before that ever
happened.)

In a way similarly to Scully, from Pensato is closely tuned to the small sensory moments and
images that make up a life as it is lived and the world as it is in the process
of continual change.These are a series
of snippets segueing into each other over the course of 22 pages, sometimes
just a handful of lines each, crisp and at times haiku-like.Here is one: “a snatch of air / freezes / on
the lip // crisp & almost / sweet”.Where an autobiographical presence clearly inhabits Scully’s work, this
is less apparent in Mills’s, where there the strategy is to deemphasise the
personality of the poet as much as possible, in favor of the natural
world.Yet, subtly, we see the speaker
here in the evaluative adjective “sweet.”Further, the following poem, though grounded in flower imagery, could be
read as a personal metaphor of human relationships in the face of ephemerality:
“petals fold / against / each other // held delicate / tension / & weave //
a fragile durability / that holds”.What
also “weaves” us together here is poetry itself — beyond the metaphor, the
astute reader is drawn to the slant or near-rhyme of “fold,” “held,” “holds,”
the soft-‘e’ assonance of “held,” delicate,” “tension,” and the hard-‘e’
assonance of “each,” and “weave.”

It is also interesting to me how Mills connects nature and
the human subconsciousness (dream) through poetry.On page 13: “persist & sing / the least
need / most // an image is / that leads / sleep goes // first then this / who
dreams would / keep so” — yes! for the poet we persist through our art (“sing”)
and, through images (in poetry) and dreams, also, live; in other words the
inner life is connected both to the way we position ourselves in the outside,
natural world and to the production of our art.Here is a slight reworking of the same idea, on page 19: “& sleep
once / & dream / easily // & let the light / erase / the edge of things
// drift / purposeful & / clear”.The
consciousness, the clarity, that is provided by an artistic perception of
reality allows us to live life in a particular way.For Mills (and for myself) it is to “drift
purposeful and clear” — the seeming contradiction between drifting and purpose being
obviously resolved in this particular aesthetic stance.As Mills writes a couple of pages on, this
stance allows the world to be both “explicable & strange”.His from
Pensato is, in this regard, it seems to me, a kind of personal manifesto despite its
impersonal framing.